Most video games have adjustable Difficulty Levels so as to provide more of a challenge to good players while allowing poor players the satisfaction of finishing and finding out how the story ends. Traditionally, they would just be called Easy, Medium, and Hard (and possibly Expert). However, a recurring clever idea is to name them in a way reflecting of your game's style or plot. Another widespread trend is to Title Drop one of the difficulty settings, typically the hardest one.

Of course, if you use more than one word, everyone will call them "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard", but it does help establish continuity and mise en scène.

The former two games used to call them Normal, Real, and Expert Real in early installments.

During the XG arc of Gitadora, the difficulty names were changed to Novice, Regular, and Expert, and add Master. Master was kept in future games, but the lower three levels were renamed back to Basic, Advanced, and Extreme.

Keyboardmania had Light, Normal, and Real. Normal was renamed Light+ in 2nd Mix.

Indie puzzle game Chromashift has normal level numbers, but a different description for each:

Level 1: For Beginning Players

Level 2: A Fairly Safe Bet

Level 3: Not Too Hard

Level 4: Getting Fairly Difficult

Level 5: Yeah, Good Luck With That

City of Heroes and City of Villains used to take this a step further. You can change your difficulty at special NPCs who, for a fee, will spread word about you, affecting your Reputation (heroes) / Notoriety (villains). This affects the missions you will receive.

Heroic/Villainous (standard)

Tenacious/Malicious (more enemies)

Rugged/Vicious (harder enemies)

Unyielding/Ruthless (both)

Invincible/Relentless (standard sized spawns of even harder enemies).

The difficulty system was altered for Going Rogue. Now you can separately set what level the foes should be compared to you (from -1 to +4), how many foes should spawn in missions (from x1 to x8), whether you want to fight Bosses as Lieutenants, and whether you want to fight Archvillains as Elite Bosses.

Insane (Not that uncommon in other games, but remember who the protagonist is...)

The Curse of Monkey Island has Normal and Mega Monkey. The latter is the real full game, while the former has some of the puzzles removed and is described as being for game-reviewing journalists.

In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge you could choose between "Monkey Island 2" ("I want it all! All the puzzles! All the work!") and "Monkey 2 Lite" ("I've never played an adventure game before. I'm scared."). This is also described as being the "optional easy mode for children and magazine reviewers" on the back cover of the game.

Take No Prisoners ("You have six life tokens. Pray for vast courage.")

Facing Hell ("You have four life tokens. Pray for iron will.")

Killing Machine ("You have two life tokens. Pray for a quick death.")

Angel of Death ("Your prayers are in vain.")

The NES version of Double Dragon II: The Revenge have fancily-named difficulty levels that affected not only the strength of the enemies and the movement of traps, but also the length of the overall game.

Practice (which lasts only three stages)

Warrior (which has all the stages except the final one)

Supreme Master (the only difficulty where the final stage, and the ending, can be seen)

Made even worse by the fact that save games use an entirely different set of names for the 4 difficulty levels: "A walk in the park"; "Have a blast"; "You got what it takes?"; and "Against all odds".

Galactic Civilizations: the individual races can be set to any of Fool, Dunce, Beginner, Sub-Normal, Normal, Bright, Intelligent, Gifted, Genius, Incredible, Godlike or Ultimate; Intelligent is the only one that's fair, with the earlier ones cheating in your favour and the later ones simply cheating. The game as a whole has the following difficulties:

The Jedi Knight series of Star Wars games uses various Jedi ranks in different methods in different games, ranging from "Padawan" up to "Master". An exception to this is The Force Unleashed, which uses Sith ranks instead, from "Apprentice" up to "Master".

Kid Icarus: Uprising uses a difficulty slider from 0.0 to 9.0, with the difficulty fine-tunable to 0.1 increments. This scale would later be reused in Classic Mode of the fourth Super Smash Bros.. In addition, each 1.0 increment has its own name:

Pilgrim (Easy - resources are plentiful, the player character is hardy, wolves are likely to run away if you get too close though bears are still dangerous)

Voyager (Normal - resources are less common, the player character is weaker, wolves and bears will chase and attack if you get too close)

Stalker (Hard - resources are scarce, the player character is weak, wolves and bears are faster and give chase from a greater distance)

Many charts for Lunatic Rave 2, a beatmania IIDX clone, often have custom difficulty names set by their creators rather than the standard "Normal", "Hyper", and "Another" difficulties. Perhaps the best-known example is "FREEDOM DiVE↓", which has chards labeled "EARTH", "GALAXY", "UNIVERSE", and, most infamously, "FOUR DIMENSIONS".

The Combat Simulator in the Citadel DLC has its own difficulty settings. While some additional modifiers can be turned on and off freely, the difficulty of the enemies goes as follows (except for the Mirror Match):

Veteran Modenote Only found in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and the Trilogy release, this is equivalent to Normal in the GameCube releases of the first two games, making the new Normal actually more of an Easy mode to those who played said releases

Hard Modenote GameCube releases of first two games/Hyper Modenote Corruption and the Trilogy release of first two games

A computerised version of Monopoly rated computer opponents as Calculator, XT Clone and 386/33MHz. This was early in the PC's lifetime, when the 386/33MHz was the most powerful computer around. Of course, as it transpires, the three difficulties all turn out to be synonymous to "stupid", even if the game had a remake that replaced the "386 MHz" with "Core i7".

"Timid" ("You will grow tired blunting your weapons on a poorly-led horde of mindless corpse-men; and once you have reduced them to so much sausage filler, the sweet taste of success will turn to ashes in your mouth")

"Simple"

"Normal"

"Heroic"

"Legendary" ("You will brave the army of a Commander who has never known defeat, and the piled dead will reach the heavens; but should you succeed, in an age not yet dawned you will be spoken of as a god!")

Ratchet: Deadlocked has difficulty names based around its "gladiator battle television show" theme. Each difficulty also has an amusing description.

Couch Potatonote So you want to be on DreadZone? Can you wield a blaster as well as you can handle your remote? Don't worry, we'll give you plenty of ammo and health. And we'll tell those big mean DreadZone exterminators to go easy on you. Have fun!

Contestant note Welcome to DreadZone, contestant. We'll make sure your weapons are hitting hard and have plenty of ammo. But don't expect any favours. Our Exterminators play for keeps.

Gladiator note You're one of DreadZone's finest gladiators. You don't know the meaning of the word "capitulation". Well, DreadZone is going to make you wish you stayed in school. The warriors you'll be facing would turn an average contestant into Blargian fungus-toast. You'll need cunning strategy and lightning reflexes to survive.

Hero note Bad guys shake at the sound of your name and kids wallpaper their rooms with your face. Welcome to the big time! You'll be up against the meanest, deadliest, DreadZone combatants we've got and they'll all have Carbonox armour. You're not afraid, are you hero?

Exterminatornote DreadZone fans want to see carnage, and we're gonna give it to them by the truckload. You have no chance for survival, no hope of mercy and no dental plan. This difficulty level is flat out impossible. Turn back now. We're serious. You don't need this kind of pain.

The Rock Band series has a three-dimensional matrix of difficulties. Two of those dimensions are simply named: modes available (guitar, bass, drums and mic; 3 adds keys, Basicnote the usual fret button format and Pronote emulating real-life song tabs, requires Pro instruments closer to the real thing modes for the instruments, and Vocal Harmoniesnote for 2 or 3 singers for the mic), chart difficulties available are Easy, Normal, Hard, and Expert, but the third dimension, the difficulty for a given song on a given instrument, follows this scale:

Warmup

Apprentice

Solid

Moderate

Skilled (first game only)

Challenging

Blistering (first game only)

Nightmare

Impossible

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 didn't have selectable difficulties but each scenario had three different objective sets of increasing difficulty:

The original San Francisco Rush had audio Idiosyncratic Difficulties based on which car you picked. Each car handling class was accompanied by a car alarm which got gradually more intense the more a class traded handling for speed, topping off with Extreme's "It's dangerous!" followed by screaming. The N64 port added a few special cars that had difficulty levels of "Oooooh!" and "Yeah!"

Scorched Earth has AI skill and tactics levels, although there was no clear hierarchy of easiest to hardest beyond that Morons played like, well, morons, and the Cyborg had better aiming skills and virtually always hit whatever he aimed at.

"Moron" (Shoots at random; randomly changes its aim following a miss.)

"Tosser" (Shoots at random; adjusts aim following a miss, but not very well)

While they do have a few differences in special moves, the teams in Sonic Heroes are basically difficulty levels, with Team Rose being easy, Team Sonic being normal, Team Dark being hard, and Team Chaotix being "The Last of These Is Not Like the Others" (usually having some sort of odd mission).

Space Megaforce: The bottom two difficulties, which cause enemies to fire back when destroyed, are selected by pressing left (as if selecting an easier difficulty).

Super Smash Bros. has the following for such modes as Classic (up until the fourth installment, which uses an Intensity difficulty slider, seen in the Kid Icarus: Uprising entry), Adventure, and Master Orders. Master Orders uses the Brawl difficulties.

Team Fortress 2 has the following difficulties for Mann vs. Machine missions, which are indications of the mission's difficulty:

"Normal" (As long as your team has some idea of what they're doing, they'll be fine. The robots are manageable and special varieties aren't bad.)

"Intermediate" (A little trickier. Your strategy and teamwork will need to be better to deal with some of the tougher varieties.)

"Advanced" (Good teamwork and communication are even more important. Robots become even nastier, and giant robots become much more common. You'll need to know what and when to upgrade.)

"Expert" (You'll need the best teamwork, communication, items, strategy, and money management to stand a chance. Robots come in especially nasty varieties and often have permanent critical hits. Just about every wave has giant robots.)

The Touhou games have the standard Easy, Normal, and Hard, but above Hard is Lunatic. In addition, there's the Extra Stage, and Perfect Cherry Blossom had two difficulties for it: Extra and Phantasm, Phantasm being the harder of the two.

Most of the games also have alternative level names to go with the standard ones. Phantasmagoria of Flower View, for example, has difficulties named for different types of plants/flowers (Extra being the demonic cherry tree from PCB).

The difficulty levels in Imperishable Night, whose plot centers around a stolen full moon (don't think about it too much), are, fittingly enough, named after specific phases of the moon in Japanese:

Easy: "Shingetsu", New Moon

Normal: "Mikazuki", Third Day Moon (waxing crescent)

Hard: "Uetsu Yumihari", Upper Bowstring Moon (waxing half-moon)

Lunatic: "Matsuyoi", Waiting Evening (waxing gibbous, specifically the day just before a full moon)

And then the Extra Stage has one final moon phase: Full Moon. note Fitting, as it takes place in the wee hours of the morning after you restore the true full moon to Gensokyo

Subterranen Animism also has its own naming scheme:

Easy: Fairy Class

Normal: Kappa Class

Hard: Tengu Class

Lunatic: Oni God Class

Ten Desires has prayers for stuff that supposedly ranges from easy to impossible to achieve:

Easy: Pray for health and long life

Normal: Pray for traffic safety

Hard: Pray for business prosperity

Lunatic: Pray for IT data security

In addition, in all games the difficulty level comes with a subtitle, with Easy usually being toted as "for Sunday gamers" and Lunatic generally being titled "for weird people" or "not suited for anyone".

Even some of the fangames get in on it. Gensou Shoujo Taisen has difficulties named after SRW games.

VSB-doom, a Game Mod for Doom which allows you to play as the cat-like alien Coeurl (unfortunately, the mod seems unavailable anywhere on the internet.) Note the inversion from the usual fare—rather than go "from wuss to badass", the levels go "from strong to weak".

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